by Naomi Novik
She straightened up and looked at us all, irresolute. I don’t think she wanted to leave us there alone, in the condition we were in, but there wasn’t much choice. Kasia bit her lip, then knelt in front of me and looked me in the face. “I’m going to Kamik,” she said. “I think it’s closer than Zatochek. I’ll run all the way. Hold on, Nieshka, I’ll be back as soon as I can find anyone.”
I only stared at her. She hesitated, and then she reached into my skirt pocket and brought out Jaga’s book. She pressed it into my hands. I closed my fingers around it, but I didn’t move. She turned and plunged into the grass, hacking and pushing her way through, following the last light to the west.
I sat in the grass like a field mouse, thinking of nothing. The sound of Kasia fighting her way through the tall grass faded away. I was tracing the stitches of Jaga’s book, feeling the soft ridges in the leather, mindlessly, staring at it. The Dragon lay inert beside me. His burns were getting worse, blisters rising translucent all over his skin. Slowly I opened the book and turned pages. Good for burns, better with morning cobwebs and a little milk, said the laconic page for one of her simpler remedies.
I didn’t have cobwebs or milk, but after a little sluggish thought I put out my hand to one of the broken stems of grass around us and squeezed a few milky green drops out onto my finger. I rubbed them between my thumb and finger and hummed, “Iruch, iruch,” up and down, like singing a child down to sleep, and began to lightly touch the worst of his blisters one after another with my fingertip. Each one twitched and slowly began to shrink instead of swell, the angriest red fading.
The working made me feel—not better exactly, but cleaner, as though I were rinsing water over a wound. I kept singing on and on and on and on. “Stop making that noise,” the Falcon said finally, lifting his head on a hiss.
I reached out and grabbed his wrist. “Groshno’s spell for burns,” I told him: it was one of the charms the Dragon had tried to teach me when he’d still been insisting on thinking me a healer.
The Falcon was silent, and then he hoarsely began, “Oyideh viruch,” the start of the chant, and I went back to my humming, “Iruch, iruch,” while I felt out his spell, fragile as a spoked wheel built out of stalks of hay instead of wood, and hooked my magic onto it. He broke off his chant. I managed to hold the working together long enough to prod him into starting again.
It wasn’t nearly the same as casting with the Dragon. This was like trying to push in harness with an old and contrary mule that I didn’t like very much, with savage hard teeth waiting to bite me. I was trying to hold back from the Falcon even while I drove on the spell. But once he picked up the thread, the working began to grow. The Dragon’s burns began fading quickly to new skin, except for a dreadful shiny scar twisting down the middle of his arm and side where the worst of the blisters had been.
The Falcon’s voice was strengthening beside me, and my head cleared, too. Power was coursing through us, a renewed tide swelling, and he shook his head, blinking with it. He twisted his hand and caught my wrist, reaching for me, for more of my magic. Instinctively I jerked loose, and we lost the thread of the working. But the Dragon was already rolling over onto his hands, heaving for breath, retching. He coughed up masses of black wet soot out of his lungs. When the fit subsided, he sank back wearily onto his heels, wiping his mouth, and looked up. The queen was still standing on the razed ground nearby, a luminous pillar in the dark.
He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Of all the fool’s errands that ever were,” he rasped, so hoarse I could barely hear it, and dropped his hands again. He reached for my arm, and I helped him drag himself to his feet. We were alone in the sea of cooling grass. “We need to get back to Zatochek,” he said, prodding. “To the supplies we left there.”
I stared back at him dully, my strength fading again as the magic ebbed. The Falcon had already subsided back into a heap. The soldiers were beginning to shiver and twitch, their eyes staring as if they saw other things. Even Marek had gone inert, a silent slouched boulder between them. “Kasia went for help,” I said finally.
He looked around at the prince, the soldiers, the queen; back to me and the Falcon, down to the dregs of ourselves. He rubbed his face. “All right,” he said. “Help me lay them straight on their backs. The moon is almost up.”
We wrestled Prince Marek and the soldiers flat in the grass, all three of them staring blindly at the sky. By the time we had wearily pushed down the grass around them, the moon was on their faces. The Dragon put me between him and the Falcon. We didn’t have the strength for a full purging: the Dragon and the Falcon only chanted another few rounds of the shielding spell he’d used that morning, and I hummed my little cleansing spell, Puhas, puhas, kai puhas. A little color seemed to come back into their faces.
Kasia came back not quite an hour later, driving a woodcutter’s cart with a hard expression. “I’m sorry I took so long,” she said shortly; I didn’t ask how she’d got the cart. I knew what someone would have thought, seeing her come from the direction of the Wood, looking as she did.
We tried to help her, but she had to do the work mostly alone. She lifted Prince Marek and the two soldiers onto the cart, then heaved the three of us up after them. We sat with our legs dangling out the back. Kasia went to the queen and stepped between her and the trees, breaking the line of her gaze. The queen looked at her with the same blankness. “You aren’t in there anymore,” Kasia said to the queen. “You’re free. We’re free.”
The queen didn’t answer her, either.
We were a week in Zatochek, all of us laid out on pallets in the barn on the edge of town. I don’t remember any of it from the moment I fell asleep in the cart until I woke up three days later in the warm quieting smell of hay, with Kasia at my bedside wiping my face with a damp cloth. The dreadful honey-sweet taste of the Dragon’s purging elixir coated my mouth. When I was strong enough to stagger up from my cot, later that morning, he put me through another round of purging, and then made me do another for him.
“The queen?” I asked him, as we sat on a bench outside afterwards, both of us rag-limp.
He jerked his chin forward, and I saw her: she was in the shade on the other side of the clearing, sitting quietly on a stump beneath a willow-tree. She still wore the enchanted yoke, but someone had given her a white dress. There wasn’t a stain or smudge anywhere on it; even the hem was clean, as if she hadn’t moved from the spot since she’d been put into it. Her beautiful face was blank as an unwritten book.
“Well, she’s free,” the Dragon said. “Was it worth the lives of thirty men?”
He spoke savagely, and I hugged my arms around myself. I didn’t want to think about that nightmarish battle, about the slaughter. “Those two soldiers?” I said, a whisper.
“They’ll live,” he said. “And so will our fine princeling: more fortune than he deserves. The Wood’s grip on them was weak.” He pushed himself up. “Come: I’m purging them by stages. It’s time for another round.”
Two days later, Prince Marek was himself again with a speed that made me feel dull and sourly envious: he rose from his bed in the morning and by dinnertime he was wolfing down an entire roast chicken and doing exercises. I could barely taste the few mouthfuls of bread I forced down. Watching him pull himself up and down on a tree-branch made me feel even more like a cloth that had been washed and wrung out too many times. Tomasz and Oleg were awake, too, the two soldiers; I’d learned their names by then, ashamed that I didn’t know any of the ones we’d left behind.
Marek tried to take some food to the queen. She only stared at the plate he held out to her, and wouldn’t chew when he put slivers of meat in her mouth. Then he tried a bowl of porridge: she didn’t refuse, but she didn’t help. He had to work the spoon into her mouth like a mother with an infant just learning how to eat. He kept at it grimly, but after an hour, when he’d barely managed to get half a dozen swallows into her, he got up and hurled the bowl and spoon savagely against a rock, porrid
ge and pottery-shards flying. He stormed away. The queen didn’t even blink at that, either.
I stood in the doorway of the barn, watching and wretched. I couldn’t be sorry to have got her out—at least she wasn’t being tormented by the Wood anymore, devoured to the scraps of herself. But this awful half-life left to her seemed worse than dying. She wasn’t ill or delirious, the way Kasia had been those first few days after the purging. There just didn’t seem to be enough left of her to feel or think.
The next morning, Marek came up behind me and caught me by the arm as I trudged back to the barn with a bucket of well-water; I jumped in alarm and sloshed water over us both, trying to jerk out of his grip. He ignored both the water and my efforts and snapped at me, “Enough of this! They’re soldiers; they’ll be fine. They’d already be fine, if the Dragon didn’t keep emptying potions into their bellies. Why haven’t you done anything for her?”
“What do you imagine there is to do?” the Dragon said, coming out of the barn.
Marek wheeled on him. “She needs healing! You haven’t even dosed her, when you have flasks to spare—”
“If there was corruption in her to purge, we’d purge it,” the Dragon said. “You can’t heal absence. Consider yourself lucky she didn’t burn with the heart-tree; if you want to call it luck, and not a pity.”
“A pity you didn’t, if that’s all the advice you have,” Marek said.
The Dragon’s eye glittered with what looked to me like a dozen cutting replies, but he compressed his lips and shut them in. Marek’s teeth were moving against each other, and through his gripping hand I could feel strung-hard tension, a trembling like a spooked horse, though he’d been as steady as a rock in that terrible glade with death and danger all around him.
The Dragon said, “There’s no corruption left in her. For the rest, only time and healing will help. We’ll take her back to the tower as soon as I’ve finished purging your men and it’s safe for them to go among other people. I’ll see what else can be done. Until then, sit with her and talk of familiar things.”
“Talk?” Marek said. He shoved my arm out of his grip; more water sloshed out over my feet as he stalked away.
The Dragon took the bucket from me, and I followed him back into the barn. “Can we do anything for her?” I asked.
“What is there to be done with a blank slate?” he said. “Give her some time and she may write something new on it. As for bringing back whatever she was—” He shook his head.
Marek sat by the queen the rest of the day; I had glimpses of his hard, downturned face a few times when I came out of the barn. But at least he seemed to accept there wasn’t going to be a sudden miraculous cure. That evening he got up and walked to Zatochek to speak to the village headman; the next day, when Tomasz and Oleg could finally walk as far as the well and back on their own, he gripped them hard by the shoulders and said, “We’ll light a fire for the others tomorrow morning, in the village square.”
Men came from Zatochek to bring us horses. They were wary of us, and I couldn’t blame them. The Dragon had sent word we would come out of the Wood, and he’d told them where to keep us and what signs of corruption to look for, but even so I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d come with torches instead, to burn us all inside the barn. Of course, if the Wood had taken possession of us, we’d have done worse things than sit in a barn quietly exhausted for a week.
Marek himself helped Tomasz and Oleg up into their saddles before he lifted the queen up to her own, a steady brown mare some ten years old. She sat stiff and inflexible; he had to put her feet one by one into the stirrups. He paused, looking up at her from the ground: the reins hung slack in her manacled hands where he’d given them to her. “Mother,” he tried again. She didn’t look at him. After a moment, his jaw hardened. He took a rope and made a leading rein for her horse, hooked it to his own saddle, and led her on.
We rode behind him to the square and found a tall bonfire assembled and waiting, full of seasoned wood, and all the village in their holiday best standing on the far side. They held torches in their hands. I didn’t know anyone from Zatochek well, but they came occasionally to our market days in spring. A handful of distantly familiar faces looked out at me from the crowd, like ghosts from another life through the faint grey haze of smoke, while I stood opposite them with a prince and wizards.
Marek took a torch himself: he stood by the wood pile with his brand lifted into the air and named every man we had lost, one after another, and Janos at the last. He beckoned to Tomasz and Oleg, and together the three of them stepped forward and thrust their torches into the heaped wood. The smoke came smarting into my eyes and barely-healed throat, and the heat was dreadful. The Dragon watched the fire catch with a hard face and then turned away: I know he didn’t think much of the prince honoring the men he’d led to their deaths. But it loosened something in me to hear all their names.
The bonfire kept burning a long time. The villagers brought out food and beer, whatever they had, and pressed it on us. I crept away into a corner with Kasia and drank too many cups of beer, washing misery and smoke and the taste of the purging-elixir out of my mouth, until finally we leaned against each other and wept softly; I had to hold on to her, because she didn’t dare grip me tight.
The drink made me lighter and more dull at the same time, my head aching, and I snuffled into my sleeves. Across the square, Prince Marek was speaking to the village headman and a wide-eyed young carter. They were standing beside a handsome green wagon, fresh-painted, with a team of four horses, their manes and tails clumsily braided in green ribbons also. The queen was already sitting in the wagon bed, cushioned on straw, with a wool cloak draped over her shoulders. The golden chains of the enchanted yoke caught the sunlight and glittered against her shift.
I blinked a few times at the sun-dazzle, and by the time I began to make sense of what I was looking at, the Dragon was already striding across the square, demanding, “What are you doing?” I climbed to my feet and went to them.
Prince Marek turned even as I came. “Arranging for passage to take the queen home,” he said, pleasantly.
“Don’t be absurd. She needs healing—”
“Which she can get in the capital as easily as here,” Prince Marek said. “I don’t choose to let you lock my mother up in your tower until it pleases you to let her out again, Dragon. Don’t imagine that I’ve forgotten how unwillingly you came with us.”
“You seem ready to forget a great many other things,” the Dragon bit out. “Such as your vows to raze the Wood all the way to Rosya, if we succeeded.”
“I’ve forgotten nothing,” Marek said. “I haven’t the men to help you now. What better way to get you the men you need than by going back to the court to ask my father for them?”
“The only thing you can do at court is parade around that hollow puppet and call yourself a hero,” the Dragon said. “Send for the men! We can’t simply go now. Do you think the Wood won’t make answer for what we’ve done, if we ride away and leave the valley defenseless?”
Marek kept his fixed smile, but it trembled on his face, and his hand worked open and shut upon his sword-hilt. The Falcon smoothly inserted himself between them, laying a hand on Marek’s arm, and said, “Your Highness, while Sarkan’s tone is objectionable, he isn’t mistaken.”
For a moment I thought perhaps he understood, now; perhaps the Falcon had felt enough of the malice of the Wood for himself to realize the threat it made. I looked at the Dragon with surprised hope, but his face was hardening, even before the Falcon turned to him with a graceful inclination of his head. “I think Sarkan will agree that despite his gifts, the Willow exceeds him in the healing arts, and she will be able to aid the queen if anyone can. And it is his sworn duty to hold back the Wood. He cannot leave the valley.”
“Very well,” Prince Marek said at once, even though he was talking through his clenched teeth: a rehearsed answer. They had worked it out between them, I realized in dawning outrage.
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Then the Falcon added, “And you in turn must realize, Sarkan, that Prince Marek cannot possibly let you just keep Queen Hanna and your peasant girl here.” He gestured to Kasia, standing beside me. “Of course they must both go to the capital, at once, and face their trial for corruption.”
“A clever piece of maneuvering,” the Dragon said to me afterwards, “and an effective one. He’s right: I don’t have the right to abandon the valley without the king’s leave, and by the law, strictly speaking, they must both stand trial.”
“But it doesn’t have to be this instant!” I said. I darted a look at the queen, sitting listless and silent in the wagon while the villagers piled too many supplies and blankets in around her, more than we would have needed if we’d been going to the capital and back again three times without a stop. “What if we just took her back to the tower, now—her and Kasia? Surely the king would understand—”
The Dragon snorted. “The king’s a reasonable man. He wouldn’t have minded in the least if I’d discreetly whisked away the queen for a convalescence out of anyone’s sight, before anyone had seen her or even knew for certain that she was rescued. But now?” He waved an arm at the villagers. Everyone had gathered in a loose ring near the wagon, at a safe distance, to stare at the queen and whisper bits of the story to each other. “No. He would object greatly to my openly defying the law of the realm before witnesses.”
Then he looked at me and said, “And I can’t go, either. The king might allow it, but not the Wood.”
I stared back at him, hollow. “I can’t let them just take Kasia,” I said, half a plea. I knew this was where I belonged, where I was needed, but to let them drag Kasia off to the capital for this trial, where the law said they might put her to death—and I didn’t trust Prince Marek at all, except to do whatever suited him best.